Google Earth Helps To Track Sudan Atrocities
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Satellite pictures of razed villages and squalid refugee camps scattered across Darfur can now be viewed by a global audience after Google Earth put the images online.
Users of Google Earth, a satellite mapping service that attracts hundreds of millions of viewers, will see the war-torn region of western Sudan highlighted with yellow boundaries and labeled “Crisis in Darfur.” Blue marks scattered across the pictures of Darfur’s harsh, arid landscape indicate refugee camps, which are holding about 2 million people; red flames denote villages that gunmen have destroyed.
Google Earth also carries graphic photographs and eyewitness testimony of atrocities committed during the civil war, which broke out in 2003 and has claimed about 300,000 lives through violence, starvation, or disease.
